We use tools from mathematics, physics, and statistics to answer questions about how organisms evolve, power themselves, and live in an unpredictable world. We are particularly interested in scientific questions that can help people -- from medicine to crop engineering. And we're very good buddies with Systems & Signals, with whom much research is shared and fun is had!

Friday, 28 October 2016

ARTICLE: Random number seed

Natural variability across scales, from the molecular to the environmental, means that individual seeds behave differently; we explore the challenges this variability poses for agriculture and food security, and how modern science can help address these challenges.

Seeds feed the world. Whether eaten themselves, or allowed to develop into crop plants which are then consumed by humans or livestock, seeds are the fundamental starting point for agriculture. But each seed has a different story. Throughout millions of years of evolution, plants have evolved to -- forgive the pun -- "hedge" their bets from one generation to the next. A parent plant cannot completely predict the environmental conditions that its offspring will face, so it induces variability in the seeds it produces. If some seeds are better at surviving in environment A and some are better in environment B, the plant has a way of ensuring its genes will survive regardless of whether the environment is A-like or B-like in future.

This bet-hedging is a sensible evolutionary strategy when environments are unpredictable. But modern agriculture makes environments much more predictable than the wild situations plants have been exposed to throughout evolutionary history. Now bet-hedging becomes a bad thing -- if we know the environment will always be C, energy spent ensuring that seeds survive in environments A and B is wasted, reducing potential yields.

Understanding and controlling the variability within populations of seeds thus has huge implications for agriculture. Variability inherent within populations of seeds, in addition to differences in the environments that seeds experience, means that, for example, seed lots germinate asynchronously (some quickly, some slowly or not at all). This leads to non-uniform and sub-optimal crop production, allows pests to enter fields, and challenges our ability to plan agricultural strategies. If we could control seed variability, these problems would be diminished, with a host of positive consequences for food security.

A given set of seeds will vary in their behaviour due to influences on many scales, from random molecular processes within cells to large-scale environmental stimuli. As a result, important features like germination propensity vary across seed lots (perhaps taking a broad distribution like that illustrated here), posing a challenge to agriculture and food security, which scientific understanding can mitigate.

In a new review, we survey our current understanding of the sources of variability in seeds, and its biological and agricultural implications. Processes across many scales induce variability in seed behaviour, from random cell biological interactions (like we've writtenabout before!), through seed position in a parent plant, to large-scale environmental differences. We particularly focus on germination, an aspect of seed behaviour of crucial biological and agronomic importance, which takes place when a "developmental switch" in a seed is flipped. We discuss the genetic and molecular players that modern science has discovered to influence this decision to germinate in seeds, and describe the challenges in furthering our understanding of this vital question -- and how cool new tech, and maths, can help us make new progress! The review is in the Journal of Experimental Botany here. Iain